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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Taliban is the future-- another, more imp Pakistani
debate (S. Jabbar)
2. Re: Taliban is the future (S. Jabbar)
3. Re: Taliban is the future (Rahul Asthana)
--- Begin Message --->From The Daily Times, Pakistan Mar 10, 2010 A secular state is a moral state By Ishtiaq Ahmed The modern secular-democratic state must ensure that all individuals as well as majorities and minorities enjoy freedom of religion and conscience and the political right to choose their government In the last few weeks the Daily Times has carried a number of very interesting articles for and against making Pakistan a secular state. Babar Ayaz pleaded for amending the Pakistani constitution with a view to making it a secular state (‘Amendments for a secular constitution’, Daily Times, February 2, 2010). Dr S M Rahman of the Friends Foundation took a diametrically opposite stand, debunking the secular state as an immoral entity, which allegedly focuses entirely on the pursuit of hedonistic interests and pleasures (‘Is secularism that sacrosanct?’ Daily Times, February 22, 2010). Both authors have advanced seriously considered arguments in favour of their political and ideological preferences. I fully sympathise with Babar Ayaz as he has referred to the hard facts of the brutalisation of society that has taken place in Pakistan in recent years. Some further arguments can be adduced in support of the secular state. The basic flaw in Dr Rahman’s thesis is that instead of reviewing contemporary views on the secular state, he eclectically quotes fictional literature and with a broad sweep the history of 2,000 years of Christendom, the Renaissance, the Reformation and so on, but does not attempt a review of the development in political theory and practice with regard to the contemporary secular state. Not only Rousseau but some other Western writers have shown admiration for the state of Medina founded by the Prophet (PBUH) and sustained for a while by his pious successors (29 years according to the Sunnis and a mere six years according to the Shias). However, what those writers have not done but which any serious and honest scholar of today — Muslim or non-Muslim — cannot escape noticing is that subsequent attempts to resuscitate the ideal Islamic state have been unmitigated disasters. I have shown in my doctoral dissertation (‘The Concept of an Islamic State: An Analysis of the Ideological Controversy in Pakistan’ published in 1987 and again in 1992), that the Quran does not provide a general theory of the state or government; it at most provides a sui generis idea of a Prophet-in-Authority. The Prophet (PBUH) was a lawgiver, a law enforcer or and a law adjudicator. Upon his death the role of lawgiver was over. The pious caliphs could at most claim the right to enforce the law and to adjudicate it when it was violated. With the assassination of Ali in 661 AD, the ideal Islamic state ceased to exist. During the pre-modern period, education, information and knowledge were restricted to very small elites, pious or corrupt. In such circumstances, societies were lucky to have a benevolent despot in power but were mostly ruled by absolute rulers; many were tyrants. One can argue that at that period in history it was but natural that some gifted individuals could make a huge difference in the lives of people. Since the Prophet (PBUH) and his pious successors were in their own time revolutionaries who tried to establish a more just society than what was present contemporaneously in the 7th century, their achievements have admirers not only among Muslims but also others. With the advances in education, information, law, constitutionalism, moral philosophy and political theory, there is no need for pinning hope on gifted individuals. Rather the need is to build institutions that ensure respect for the rights of citizens. The modern conception of the state begins with Machiavelli — an authority that Dr Rahman probably is referring to with regard to morality. That view of the secular state has indeed visited great suffering on humanity during the period of nationalism, and the two World Wars and the Holocaust are examples of it. However, the state as an entity upholding the rule of law and itself accepting limits to its power and authority by law has a long pedigree. It origins are undoubtedly the British Isles. The rule of law meant recognition of the rights of individuals to certain inalienable freedoms. Those freedoms included the freedom to conscience and religion as well. It is such a secular state that has evolved during the 20th century into a welfare state, and after World War II it has become truly universal, requiring equal treatment of men and women, protection of the rights of minorities to their culture and religion, and committed the state to promote the welfare of its citizens. I do not find such developments immoral in any sense of the word. On the contrary, the modern secular state prescribes a very advanced morality — that its citizens have the right to be liberated from want and hunger, illiteracy and disempowerment, which has been the lot of the mass of the people throughout history. Moreover, the modern secular-democratic state must ensure that all individuals as well as majorities and minorities enjoy the freedom of religion and conscience and the political right to choose their government. There are of course many other rights that are now part of the UN conventions and national constitutions. The whole idea is that the government cannot arbitrarily repeal the human and civil rights of citizens. No doubt the secular-democratic state is no guarantee that its constitution and laws will never allow abuse of power — the unlawful invasion of Iraq in 2003 by religious freaks like US President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair are some indication of the need to extend the rule of law beyond the state to international relations. In other words, there is an urgent need to ensure that the violation of international law that results in the deaths of innocent people is criminalised even more strongly. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been assigned the task of ensuring that leaders who are guilty of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide are tried and punished. It represents a secular morality that is far superior to all the ‘might-is-right’ conquests that were normal when warrior nations such as the Romans and Arabs or later the Europeans could embark upon and subjugate other peoples. Secular political thought, tempered by the growing realisation that human beings have to be treated as equal and free without regard to race, nationality or religion, has created vastly different possibilities for human beings to live in peace and enjoy a life of dignity under the law. Therefore, the modern secular state is a moral state. Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isa...@nus.edu.sg > From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2...@yahoo.com> > Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:49:29 -0800 (PST) > To: Sarai Reader-list <reader-l...@sarai.net>, yasir ~يا سر > <yasir.me...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Taliban is the future > > Dear Yasir Not 'writing from across the border'. So no 'border-glasses'. On > the contrary, mine might be broader-glasses. I would like to believe > that I have greater objectivity regarding both Pakistan and India as compared > to most who are living in either country. This comment of yours was > interesting - " foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, saudi, > india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional agendas in > the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata" Have heard that mouthed > very often in/on Pakistani Media. You forgot to mention Iran (especially wrt > Balochistan). These days one often hears Pakistanis claiming that TTP ( > Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) is borne/reared/nurtured/promoted/financed by > India. Kshmendra --- On Tue, 3/9/10, yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> > wrote: From: yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] > Taliban is the future To: "Sarai Reader-list" <reader-l...@sarai.net> Date: > Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 9:12 PM 1. Hamid Gul is a cold warrior, with an > islamist pov. always interesting to hear. yet he and his views have been > marginalized in pk. let us us say it is the end of the zia era. 2. pk and afg > are very different entities. while taliban are making a quiet come back in > afg, even they themselves are not supporting the pk-taliban as this would sour > their relations with pk. besides the pk-talibs are either being massacred or > disappearing to resurface at some point later, the moment in northwest-pk. so > this can be dicey for that region only ie fata. there is no such problem for > the rest of the country. foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, > saudi, india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional > agendas in the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata - a fact of life at > the moment. but the country seems to have regained some agency of itself with > upsurge in popular sentiment and pressure on govt since the lawyers movement > and the last elections. a good point for negotiations with india for instance, > to streamline our own common regional agendas, which are overdue since at > least partition, actually much before... 3. pk-taliban or their views, in > fact islamist views are definitely on the margin in pk at the moment. so i > totally disagree with KK (who is writing fron across the border wearing > border-glasses), and agree with pawan, that the common enemy are the islamists > in afg/pk/and hardly so (ie totally overblown) in india, where too, just like > us, they love to make a circus out of it. lets hope the common bonds are > stronger than the hate, of which there has been enough. best, > y _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an > email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject > header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an > email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject > header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---The military’s ideology By Ayesha Siddiqa Friday, 25 Sep, 2009 PAKISTAN observers often wonder what the Pakistan military’s primary ideology is. Is it a secular institution or one which is high on religious values? Since the military is considered the strongest institution of the Pakistani state, the question becomes critical in determining what direction the country will take or how its armed forces will fight the war on terror. One particular perspective is that the military is essentially a secular institution which got transformed temporarily under Gen Ziaul Haq, who made sure that his officers had a religious grounding. He had allowed the tableeghi jamaat to penetrate the armed forces and introduced a religiously conservative current in society. Subsequently, the Zia era was blamed for the continued links between certain military personnel and the Taliban post-9/11. Later, it was argued that Gen Pervez Musharraf put the military back on the secular track by weeding out religious-minded, senior officers replacing them with others who were socially acceptable to the international community. In fact, senior officers now claim that the military is highly professional and secular. This is correct in that ‘secular’ in this case means that the army is not driven purely by religious instincts in pursuing its goals. But then ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ are not the right terms to describe the organisation. Indeed, if one is searching for the correct term, it would be pragmatic-nationalist. This means that instead of sticking to one ideology the institution can shift between a couple or more ideologies at the same time. So, when it was convenient to turn religiously ideological during the 1980s it could do so. Even Gen Zia was not solely driven by his personal inclination to support the Afghan ‘jihad’; the geo-strategic and geopolitical environment was important in the framing of decisions. There was no dichotomy between pursuing jihad and having a strategic alignment with the US even then. Zia also found religious ideology handy in pursuing other military-strategic goals. Deploying non-state actors was financially, politically and militarily cost-effective. Hence, all generals maintained links with the jihadis despite the fact that they were different from Zia. The pragmatist-nationalist character of the military also explains why it was able to swiftly shift between ideologies, especially after it had to undergo a change in the wake of 9/11. This also means that maintaining links with the different jihadi organisations, as explained by Arif Jamal in Shadow War: the Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, does not necessarily depend on having a religious ideology. The author’s interesting conclusion is that even seemingly ‘secular’ generals like the present chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, could pursue the same policy as the generals during the 1990s. Jamal claims that a lot of jihadi organisations were thrilled to hear of the appointment of Gen Kayani as the new chief and many reopened their offices in 2008. He also argues that several meetings were arranged between the various Afghan Taliban groups and the Kashmiri jihadis in 2007 by the ISI to help them with a strategy to stop Indian help from reaching Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul and placing more sleeper cells in India for possible activation at later dates. This argument explains the character of the Pakistan Army and its use of religion or at least one aspect of it, namely jihad, for its strategic advantage. There is nothing odd in the argument since the military was part of what was described by Hamza Alavi as the Muslim salariat class, which used religion to motivate a movement for an independent state. The fact is that this class was always linked to the use of religious ideology. It might not want to adopt a Saudi model for state-making, though the Pakistani state has gradually moved closer to Saudi Arabia, but religion has always remained central to the fulfilment of the strategic goals of the salariat, which later evolved into the ruling elite. This basically meant that while the Islamic norms of social justice might not be adopted, religious identity would be used in some form to meet political and military-strategic objectives. Jamal’s argument is that like all such plans that generate opportunity costs, the jihadis of today, who seem to be challenging the Pakistani state, are inadvertently a product of a specific plan to fight the war in Kashmir. The camps where Ajmal Qasab and others were trained by the Lashkar-i-Taiba to carry out the Mumbai attacks, the author claims, were set up by the ISI to win the war in Kashmir. Even if the attack was not ordered by the intelligence agency, it indicates a situation where the jihadis trained for a particular purpose might have used their training to carry out attacks on their own or gone beyond the brief. Obviously, the military always had to use religion as a motivating factor from the time when Col Akhtar Malik planned the first offensive to capture Kashmir in 1947/48 to the 1980s and 1990s when, according to Jamal, a lot of new jihadi organisations were established. Gen Ayub Khan adopted a similar approach while planning the historic but failed Operation Gibraltar in 1965. However, the military was not the only force which used the above-mentioned approach. Even seemingly liberal-secular leaders like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto favoured the policy of using non-state actors to the country’s perceived military advantage. For instance, Bhutto personally came to congratulate the hijackers of an Indian Airlines flight in January 1971. It is important to remember that the use of non-state actors was part of a larger package of mixing religion with state strategy. In adopting this approach Bhutto might have not been too far off from Ziaul Haq who, as Jamal argues, developed an alignment with the Jamaat-i-Islami to support the Afghan jihad and to use that as a cover for strengthening the army’s war in Kashmir. The country’s ruling elite and the military have traditionally used a particular aspect of religion to gain strategic dividends. While they can conveniently claim to have retained their secularism and saved one organisation from turning ideological, a similar claim might not be made for society at large. The proliferation of ‘jihad’ in mainland Pakistan is but the opportunity cost of strategy. The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst. > From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2...@yahoo.com> > Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:49:29 -0800 (PST) > To: Sarai Reader-list <reader-l...@sarai.net>, yasir ~يا سر > <yasir.me...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Taliban is the future > > Dear Yasir Not 'writing from across the border'. So no 'border-glasses'. On > the contrary, mine might be broader-glasses. I would like to believe > that I have greater objectivity regarding both Pakistan and India as compared > to most who are living in either country. This comment of yours was > interesting - " foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, saudi, > india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional agendas in > the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata" Have heard that mouthed > very often in/on Pakistani Media. You forgot to mention Iran (especially wrt > Balochistan). These days one often hears Pakistanis claiming that TTP ( > Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) is borne/reared/nurtured/promoted/financed by > India. Kshmendra --- On Tue, 3/9/10, yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> > wrote: From: yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] > Taliban is the future To: "Sarai Reader-list" <reader-l...@sarai.net> Date: > Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 9:12 PM 1. Hamid Gul is a cold warrior, with an > islamist pov. always interesting to hear. yet he and his views have been > marginalized in pk. let us us say it is the end of the zia era. 2. pk and afg > are very different entities. while taliban are making a quiet come back in > afg, even they themselves are not supporting the pk-taliban as this would sour > their relations with pk. besides the pk-talibs are either being massacred or > disappearing to resurface at some point later, the moment in northwest-pk. so > this can be dicey for that region only ie fata. there is no such problem for > the rest of the country. foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, > saudi, india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional > agendas in the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata - a fact of life at > the moment. but the country seems to have regained some agency of itself with > upsurge in popular sentiment and pressure on govt since the lawyers movement > and the last elections. a good point for negotiations with india for instance, > to streamline our own common regional agendas, which are overdue since at > least partition, actually much before... 3. pk-taliban or their views, in > fact islamist views are definitely on the margin in pk at the moment. so i > totally disagree with KK (who is writing fron across the border wearing > border-glasses), and agree with pawan, that the common enemy are the islamists > in afg/pk/and hardly so (ie totally overblown) in india, where too, just like > us, they love to make a circus out of it. lets hope the common bonds are > stronger than the hate, of which there has been enough. best, > y _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an > email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject > header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an > email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject > header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---I do not disagree with the major thrust of this article but calling the army pragmatic nationalist is really a disrespect to the nation and people of Pakistan. The secession of Bangladesh in 1971 primarily due to the brutalities of the army is only one datapoint. There are many others which will effectively rebut the so called nationalist identity of the army.As the cliche goes, Pakistan is not a nation with an army but an army with a nation, The best way to analyze the army is as a well oiled corporate body intent on maximising its own profits. ----- Original Message ---- From: S. Jabbar <sonia.jab...@gmail.com> To: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2...@yahoo.com>; Sarai <reader-l...@sarai.net>; yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> Sent: Wed, March 10, 2010 8:33:25 AM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Taliban is the future The military’s ideology By Ayesha Siddiqa Friday, 25 Sep, 2009 PAKISTAN observers often wonder what the Pakistan military’s primary ideology is. Is it a secular institution or one which is high on religious values? Since the military is considered the strongest institution of the Pakistani state, the question becomes critical in determining what direction the country will take or how its armed forces will fight the war on terror. One particular perspective is that the military is essentially a secular institution which got transformed temporarily under Gen Ziaul Haq, who made sure that his officers had a religious grounding. He had allowed the tableeghi jamaat to penetrate the armed forces and introduced a religiously conservative current in society. Subsequently, the Zia era was blamed for the continued links between certain military personnel and the Taliban post-9/11. Later, it was argued that Gen Pervez Musharraf put the military back on the secular track by weeding out religious-minded, senior officers replacing them with others who were socially acceptable to the international community. In fact, senior officers now claim that the military is highly professional and secular. This is correct in that ‘secular’ in this case means that the army is not driven purely by religious instincts in pursuing its goals. But then ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ are not the right terms to describe the organisation. Indeed, if one is searching for the correct term, it would be pragmatic-nationalist. This means that instead of sticking to one ideology the institution can shift between a couple or more ideologies at the same time. So, when it was convenient to turn religiously ideological during the 1980s it could do so. Even Gen Zia was not solely driven by his personal inclination to support the Afghan ‘jihad’; the geo-strategic and geopolitical environment was important in the framing of decisions. There was no dichotomy between pursuing jihad and having a strategic alignment with the US even then. Zia also found religious ideology handy in pursuing other military-strategic goals. Deploying non-state actors was financially, politically and militarily cost-effective. Hence, all generals maintained links with the jihadis despite the fact that they were different from Zia. The pragmatist-nationalist character of the military also explains why it was able to swiftly shift between ideologies, especially after it had to undergo a change in the wake of 9/11. This also means that maintaining links with the different jihadi organisations, as explained by Arif Jamal in Shadow War: the Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, does not necessarily depend on having a religious ideology. The author’s interesting conclusion is that even seemingly ‘secular’ generals like the present chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, could pursue the same policy as the generals during the 1990s. Jamal claims that a lot of jihadi organisations were thrilled to hear of the appointment of Gen Kayani as the new chief and many reopened their offices in 2008. He also argues that several meetings were arranged between the various Afghan Taliban groups and the Kashmiri jihadis in 2007 by the ISI to help them with a strategy to stop Indian help from reaching Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul and placing more sleeper cells in India for possible activation at later dates. This argument explains the character of the Pakistan Army and its use of religion or at least one aspect of it, namely jihad, for its strategic advantage. There is nothing odd in the argument since the military was part of what was described by Hamza Alavi as the Muslim salariat class, which used religion to motivate a movement for an independent state. The fact is that this class was always linked to the use of religious ideology. It might not want to adopt a Saudi model for state-making, though the Pakistani state has gradually moved closer to Saudi Arabia, but religion has always remained central to the fulfilment of the strategic goals of the salariat, which later evolved into the ruling elite. This basically meant that while the Islamic norms of social justice might not be adopted, religious identity would be used in some form to meet political and military-strategic objectives. Jamal’s argument is that like all such plans that generate opportunity costs, the jihadis of today, who seem to be challenging the Pakistani state, are inadvertently a product of a specific plan to fight the war in Kashmir. The camps where Ajmal Qasab and others were trained by the Lashkar-i-Taiba to carry out the Mumbai attacks, the author claims, were set up by the ISI to win the war in Kashmir. Even if the attack was not ordered by the intelligence agency, it indicates a situation where the jihadis trained for a particular purpose might have used their training to carry out attacks on their own or gone beyond the brief. Obviously, the military always had to use religion as a motivating factor from the time when Col Akhtar Malik planned the first offensive to capture Kashmir in 1947/48 to the 1980s and 1990s when, according to Jamal, a lot of new jihadi organisations were established. Gen Ayub Khan adopted a similar approach while planning the historic but failed Operation Gibraltar in 1965. However, the military was not the only force which used the above-mentioned approach. Even seemingly liberal-secular leaders like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto favoured the policy of using non-state actors to the country’s perceived military advantage. For instance, Bhutto personally came to congratulate the hijackers of an Indian Airlines flight in January 1971. It is important to remember that the use of non-state actors was part of a larger package of mixing religion with state strategy. In adopting this approach Bhutto might have not been too far off from Ziaul Haq who, as Jamal argues, developed an alignment with the Jamaat-i-Islami to support the Afghan jihad and to use that as a cover for strengthening the army’s war in Kashmir. The country’s ruling elite and the military have traditionally used a particular aspect of religion to gain strategic dividends. While they can conveniently claim to have retained their secularism and saved one organisation from turning ideological, a similar claim might not be made for society at large. The proliferation of ‘jihad’ in mainland Pakistan is but the opportunity cost of strategy. The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst. > From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2...@yahoo.com> > Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:49:29 -0800 (PST) > To: Sarai Reader-list <reader-l...@sarai.net>, yasir ~يا سر > <yasir.me...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Taliban is the future > > Dear Yasir Not 'writing from across the border'. So no 'border-glasses'. On > the contrary, mine might be broader-glasses. I would like to believe > that I have greater objectivity regarding both Pakistan and India as compared > to most who are living in either country. This comment of yours was > interesting - " foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, saudi, > india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional agendas in > the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata" Have heard that mouthed > very often in/on Pakistani Media. You forgot to mention Iran (especially wrt > Balochistan). These days one often hears Pakistanis claiming that TTP ( > Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) is borne/reared/nurtured/promoted/financed by > India. Kshmendra --- On Tue, 3/9/10, yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> > wrote: From: yasir ~يا سر <yasir.me...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] > Taliban is the future To: "Sarai Reader-list" <reader-l...@sarai.net> Date: > Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 9:12 PM 1. Hamid Gul is a cold warrior, with an > islamist pov. always interesting to hear. yet he and his views have been > marginalized in pk. let us us say it is the end of the zia era. 2. pk and afg > are very different entities. while taliban are making a quiet come back in > afg, even they themselves are not supporting the pk-taliban as this would sour > their relations with pk. besides the pk-talibs are either being massacred or > disappearing to resurface at some point later, the moment in northwest-pk. so > this can be dicey for that region only ie fata. there is no such problem for > the rest of the country. foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, > saudi, india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional > agendas in the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata - a fact of life at > the moment. but the country seems to have regained some agency of itself with > upsurge in popular sentiment and pressure on govt since the lawyers movement > and the last elections. a good point for negotiations with india for instance, > to streamline our own common regional agendas, which are overdue since at > least partition, actually much before... 3. pk-taliban or their views, in > fact islamist views are definitely on the margin in pk at the moment. so i > totally disagree with KK (who is writing fron across the border wearing > border-glasses), and agree with pawan, that the common enemy are the islamists > in afg/pk/and hardly so (ie totally overblown) in india, where too, just like > us, they love to make a circus out of it. lets hope the common bonds are > stronger than the hate, of which there has been enough. best, > y _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an > email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject > header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an > email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject > header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-requ...@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
--- End Message ---
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